Film Review: LA GUERRA CIVIL: A Knockout Doc on the Cultural Politics of Boxing [Sundance 2022]

La Guerra Civil Review

La Guerra Civil (2022) Film Review from the 45th Annual Sundance Film Festival, a documentary directed by Eva Longoria Bastón, featuring Julio César Chávez and Oscar De La Hoya.

A lot of existentialist talk tends to focus on the smallness of one’s self against the vastness of the universe. However, such individualist framing can lend it an air of dour defeatism that makes us shrivel up in the discomfort of too much self-awareness. It’s nice, then, to have that dichotomy flipped on its head every now and again – that is, to focus on the awesomeness of the universe’s massive size rather than the meagerness of your own in comparison.

Granted, Eva Longoria Bastón isn’t getting that heady and pretentious with La Guerra Civil (Spanish for “Civil War”), her new boxing documentary about the heated lead-up to the 1996 match between the legends Julio César Chávez and Oscar De La Hoya. However, for her subjects it’s a complicated and complex unwinding of a defining cultural moment, and the significance each player had/has in its overarching system. (And of course, for un gringo inconsciente like myself, it’s an eye-opening introduction to a culture, a sport, a fandom, and a specific intersecting moment of all three.)

Despite what its title might suggest, La Guerra Civil is quite balanced in its portrayals and approach. Both Chávez and De La Hoya are given their due – in backstories, defenses of their mindsets, and pushback from the interviewers. They have their similarities: both come from Mexican households with their fair share of troubles, both were tenacious boxers who rose to great fame, and both carried the weight of representing their communities in a deeply racialized media landscape. The real meat of the doc, though, is in the dissection of where their experiences diverge, and how they each felt advantaged and/or disadvantaged compared to the other to varying degrees, for an intertwined knot of reasons.

Longoria Bastón shows these men at their most eccentric but also at their most vulnerable, as if she herself is their cinematic therapist who is jointly helping them process their shared sense of representational responsibility. Regardless, there is no clear-cut way to feel about the cultural conflict that Chávez and De La Hoya found (and continue to find) themselves ensnared in. Neither is a “hero” nor a “heel”, but rather they are both single men having to symbolically carry their cultures’ weight on top of their own personal ones. La Guerra Civil hammers in the concept of dual identities of the individual: how the history and the present is constantly in flux on both a personal and universal level, and how that mess of contradictions can knock out even the greatest athletes and superstars. If a-star’s-rise-and-fall archetype is a sports movie cliché, then this doc serves as a nasty side hook to that notion.

Longoria Bastón tightly packs each of the fighters’ stories (not to mention a hefty overview of the Mexican and Mexican-American fandom around boxing) into just shy of two hours, and it still maintains both a thrilling pace and sense of excitement (I can only imagine this must be the same thrill that boxing fans experience). The clean editing from Luis Alvarez and the ever-present yet diverse score from Tony Morales definitely help, but so do the eclectic interviews from Chávez and De La Hoya, their family members and/or teammates, to fans the Hispanic and Latino worlds over.

The conclusion comes abruptly, though, and one wonders if that’s because of some unknown time crunch or of the filmmakers wanting to avoid the aforementioned clichés. Or maybe, to tie it back to the existentialist ponderings of the opening, maybe it’s a symbolic set-up on Longoria Bastón’s behalf: a reminder for us to focus on the greater picture of what she was trying to tell with La Guerra Civil, rather than solely on its endpoint.

After all, just like a boxing match, life will be over before we know it. Remember the good moves and the sharp punches that stood out, because it’ll be a blip in the record books before you know it.

Rating: 7/10

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